Baby Machine

The morning after my thirtieth birthday, I awoke from a nightmare that would recur for half a decade. It began with a sensation in my stomach, a rumbling that spread until it consumed my entire abdomen. The ground grew damp and cold beneath me and I was no longer in my Brooklyn apartment but in an eerie forest, tangled in roots and sinking into the earth. The rumbling turned into numbness as my flesh disintegrated and my belly filled with soil. Before I disappeared into the ground, I lifted up my shirt and looked down at my decay. Hundreds of purple and green mushrooms had sprouted from my belly, radioactive in the rot.

 “Mushrooms growing out of stomach dream meaning,” I searched the next day when I remembered the disconcerting scene. The top-ranked and presumably the most credible dream interpretation sites could not agree on a single definition. I was either very healthy and powerful or fighting off emotional or physical distress, including but not limited to infection and imminent death. Was it the flu? Or food poisoning? Deep down I knew it was something darker. My rotting belly could mean only one thing and it was a truth I had been told since puberty: wombs are precarious vessels; eggs are a finite resource; all the lady parts start deteriorating when you hit thirty and if you haven’t had a baby by thirty-five, you’re screwed. The fluorescent mushrooms became a regular reminder that my body was dying from the inside and I was running out of time.

I’d had ideas about who I’d be at thirty—confident in my career path, settled down, sitting on a comfortable nest egg—and maybe if I’d been those things, I wouldn’t have panicked when the race to have a baby began. But I wasn’t the version of thirty I’d expected. It was 2017, a year marked for me by instability and uncertainty. For the first time in my life, I had been brave enough to pursue a job in the arts and so was living off of my meager savings, spending too much of it on the cheapest insurance I could find. I forked over $222 per month for “catastrophic insurance,” which I understood to mean that if I got hit by a bus I wouldn’t be left bleeding out in the road unable to pay for an ambulance. My plan barely allowed for routine checkups let alone fertility analysis or egg freezing, though I decided in an act of self-preservation that my eggs were probably too shriveled to do me much good. As I dreamt night after night about my mushroom-laden ovaries, I felt my chances of having a baby one day perishing. So I worried. 

I worried while watching that episode of New Girl when Cece finds out her egg count is low. I cried as every beautiful baby was birthed into a bathtub in Ricki Lake’s The Business of Being Born. I scoured internet forums for fertility stories, searching for certainty and feeling more and more out of control, until finally it was time for my annual allotted doctor’s appointment. Surely science would have an answer for me. The doctor would run some tests, do a bit of math and tell me my ovaries’ expiration date, once and for all. 

If I had been paying attention, I might have seen transhumanism for the religion it was. 

“Come back when you’ve been trying for a year,” my gynecologist said, sliding out the speculum and snapping off her gloves. “Then we can talk about your options.” There was no insurance code for “anxiety-induced fertility test.” Hypothetical future infertility did not qualify as a catastrophe. In the years that followed, a wave of femtech startups would emerge, offering at-home test kits ready to predict my future for a fee, but they were in their infancy in 2017. My only option, it seemed, was to wait for the future to arrive.

Looking back, it was either a midlife crisis or madness that drove me to pack up my life in New York and wait for the future in England. I took out a student loan and hopped a one-way flight to London, where I would channel my worrying obsession with wombs into a legitimate academic pursuit. I enrolled in art school on a strange course in a narrow niche of design that my classmates and I took pride in never being able to adequately describe. “It’s like, a sci-fi masters,” we’d say in layman’s terms to the poor souls who dared to ask at the uni bar or the family party or the job interview. We designed speculative products, we explained, and made films about future scenarios, “what-ifs,” all to bring possible futures to life for discussion and debate. Futures could be studied, articulated and analyzed, “important work,” we argued, “in these ever-changing times.” What we never said but all believed was that somehow, through design intervention, a future could be created or destroyed. By imagining it, we might manifest it. 

It was in the dirty, hot glue and glitter encrusted library of my art school that I set to work studying the future of reproduction. I learned quickly that to excel in art school required sourcing the most obscure, most tangentially related references and presenting a final artifact that bore almost no resemblance to said references. I busied myself collecting books from far-flung shelves, stacking my cubicle high with titles like A Cyborg Manifesto, To Be a Machine, and The Dialectic of Sex. From these stacks, the first of my obscure references emerged.

Transhumanism was what I would later describe as a cult, or a religion, though I wouldn’t have identified it as either at the time. On the surface, the transhumanists were smart and logical. They were often scientists and mathematicians, many of whom had made it their life’s work to eliminate human suffering. They called to me from the crisp pages of my reference materials: Do you dream to be free of the human body’s frail, unreliable, aging form? Why yes, I thought. What noble work. You can live forever, they said, and so can your ovaries. I appeared on the doorstep of the church of transhumanism ready to take whatever silver bullet they had to offer. 

It became clear that the obvious solution to my fertility worries, though it was hardly a silver bullet, was to keep my body from aging. Aubrey de Grey, a man with a long gray beard that made him look older than he was, had been working for years on a cure for aging. He revealed it was well within the realm of possibility for humans to live to a thousand years old. He chided humanity for our fatalism in the face of death and urged us to consider the disservice we were doing to future generations, like mine, by failing to fund his research. When he argued that aging was “something we need to fix,” I agreed. I got a T-shirt of a phoenix emerging from the ashes with the mantra, “End Aging. Defeat Death,” and wore my newfound religion to Tesco and brunch. 

As scientists like de Grey sought the elixir of life in the lab, the crafty and impatient had begun tinkering with more mechanical solutions to mortality. With my student discount, I paid £6.25 to witness a live biohacking on stage, where a man surgically inserted a RFID chip into the fleshy bit between his first finger and thumb. Someday soon, the panel on stage suggested, humans would choose to amputate and replace our imperfect biological parts with state of the art silicone. I began to see my body for what it was, a frail and fleshy biological machine, no longer fit for purpose and in need of an upgrade. I wondered what my womb might become in the pursuit of superhuman enhancement. Anything would be better than the stagnant, decaying collection of cells inside me. The man on stage waved his souped-up hand, now wrapped in gauze, and the audience clapped. Had they asked for volunteers, I would have been next. 

In the months that followed, I dove deeper into the futures transhumanism promised. I learned of engineers whose mission was to upload the human brain to the cloud. They dreamt of living forever in non-human form, a complete consciousness in code that transcended space and time. I’d seen that Black Mirror episode, the one with two aging lovers plugged into some simulated utopian reality for eternity. But whole brain emulation wasn’t just a sci-fi utopia. According to some of the world’s leading technologists, it was hard science. The advancement in computation that was required was “imminent” as we approached the Technological Singularity, a time when author and professor Vernor Vinge predicted the rise of “computers that are ‘awake.’” When Ray Kurzweil, a top computer scientist and Director of Engineering at Google said, “reverse-engineering the human brain may be regarded as the most important project in the universe,” I believed him. 

At the peak of my devotion to transhumanism, I attended talks about existential threats to humanity, about the need to build bunker islands and settlements on Mars to ensure the survival of human civilization. Serious consideration had been given to the design of Dyson spheres, computers that could harness the energy of the stars, and how we might move entire planets off their billion-year collision course with Earth. Men I grew to know as the effective altruists stood together on stage to call for the elimination of national borders, urging us to think as one species of Homo sapiens, united in our defense against eventual alien invasions and extinction level catastrophes. At all costs, they said, we must avoid the destruction of Mankind. And it made sense. They were all men. 

If I had been paying attention, I might have seen transhumanism for the religion it was. First, there was the extensive cash flow to its leaders, mostly situated in Silicon Valley and the conspicuous heads of many of the big tech companies. Then, there was the ceremonial dress: tech bro T-shirts and dog tags. These were not ordinary dog tags. Their owners wore them to ensure whoever found their bodies upon death would read the engraved instructions and quickly freeze the deceased’s head. For $80,000 a pop, a wealthy transhumanist could have their head put on ice and shipped to Arizona, where scientists at Alcor Life Extension Foundation planned to defrost them once brain-uploading technology finally caught up. As with many religions, transhumanism promised an afterlife, or better, eternal life, albeit someday, when the kinks had all been worked out. I began to wonder how transhumanism, with its many privileged men at center stage, had ever felt like the answer to my very female fertility concerns.

After months of learning and listening, it was time to ask my own questions. I’d had many. For instance, how would Thanksgiving work if we had ten generations of family alive at once? What would dating apps be like if people could live to be two hundred? How do they choose who gets to live on the bunker island? The most important question, though, was what the men leading the transhumanists planned to do about my ticking fertility time bomb. “Is it possible that by extending our healthy lifespans we could extend our biological clocks?” I asked one prominent life extension speaker.

“Women will have the health and fertility of a typical thirty to forty year old,” they said. I could tell this was supposed to be good news. “But that’s too late,” I said in an email I never sent. I wanted more from the science. I wanted twenty-five-year-old eggs. But even those who had promised I would live forever couldn’t keep my biological clock from running out.

In the end, it wasn’t the ceremonial dress or the promise of the afterlife that alerted me to the shortcomings of transhumanism. It was the men. The converted were mostly white, mostly wealthy, mostly middle-aged and seemed united in the belief that their wealth, wisdom, and power would be enough to dodge their own demise. For them, a thirty to forty year old’s level of fertility was more than acceptable. The futures these men imagined, futures where they built remote bunkers to escape existential threats to men, were not going to save my ovaries. There may have been a place for me in that bunker, but I was pretty sure I wouldn’t like it.

Where does one turn to after losing a religion? For me, it was to the cold hard facts. To data. Data could tell me something no religion could: my step count, my sleep patterns and when I was likely to get my next period. If I could just track every data point of my fertility, I thought, maybe I could know the future. Maybe all my doctor had needed was a few more numbers to make the ovarian expiration equation complete.

At art school, even the walk to the bathroom is a runway. It’s a place to be seen and judged, which was exactly what I needed next.

I began to see data everywhere, in all things. I kept a list of how I was quantified: the number of followers I had on social media; my bank account balance; my IQ. I joined a Meetup group of data-hungry individuals and learned of the extreme measures people took to measure themselves. The so-called “Quantified Self Meetup Group” met regularly to share intimate details about their personal data. Most wore wearable trackers like Fitbits, some used one or more of the 325,000 health apps available and others took painstaking notes in elaborate spreadsheets. All of us hoped that somewhere in those bar charts and graphs we’d find some pattern; some probable future we could bend to our control. 

Data was a part of our daily lives, whether we knew it or not. On Instagram, my pregnant friends posted progress photos of their burgeoning bumps. Some posed their tiny babies next to pastel placards each month, documenting a data point in time. The internet was brimming with data, with ultrasounds and gender reveals, the earliest entries into the data set of a life. When I spoke with Deborah Lupton, a researcher studying the experience of Australian mothers who used pregnancy tracking apps, she said that many women relied on apps for “peace of mind” and reassurance that they were “performing ‘good’ motherhood.” She worried that few were concerned about sharing intimate data about their own bodies and the bodies of their children online and “the digital legacy [they were creating] on behalf of their children.” No one, not even the fetus, was free from the data economy.

The idea that our lives could be distilled into numbers both comforted and terrified me. While I was happy to track my daily steps and weight, I worried that once data about me had been collected, it might never be destroyed. It would exist forever in a web of third party data brokers, allowing someone, somewhere to sell me something or use my data against me in ways I couldn’t imagine yet. The more I learned about how data was sold and how easily it could be manipulated, the more I feared collecting, let alone knowing, the data I would need to understand my fertility.

It was around this time that I became aware of the Biobag. A group of scientists in Philadelphia had created an artificial womb and successfully brought an extremely premature lamb to term. The phrase “artificial womb” conjured up images of The Matrix, with insect-like pods in a giant, robot-monitored facility. It reminded me of the transhumanists and their quest for complete ectogenesis, where gestation happens entirely outside of the human body. But the Biobag seemed more pragmatic than the science fiction fantasies, kind of like the high tech version of a Ziploc freezer bag. The little lamb, no more free from the data economy than the rest of us, was monitored continuously, allowing scientists to adjust nutrients, temperature and oxygen levels. I couldn’t wait to show the “Quantified Self Meetup Group.” I was the lamb, I thought. We are all the lamb.

The Biobag set in motion a kind of Frankenstein moment for me. I staked claim to a corner table of our art school studio and scoured the university’s scrap heaps and haberdashery for the necessary supplies: clear plastic tubing, a programmable circuit board, latex, coffee filters and cornstarch. In the workshop, I vacuum-formed a sheet of clear acrylic into the shape of a giant egg and stitched a fabric belt to hold it in place over my belly. Into the plastic belly, I stuffed tubes filled with water and red food coloring (blood) and connected them to a clay fetus. I stitched the fetus into its own amniotic sac, then poked and prodded it with wires, as the lamb had been. Finally, it was time to program the fetal heartbeat. After putting out a battery fire I’d started, I plugged in the last wire and my creation came to life: a fully-automated, wearable womb, its tiny heart beating in red LED lights. 

The idea was simple. A hopeful parent would supply gametes to the manufacturer, who would inject an embryo into the device before shipping it back in a refrigerated van. After unboxing their womb, the parent would wear it for nine months as the fetus developed, sometimes sharing the burden of the heavy device with loved ones and always keeping the device to hand for photo opportunities. State of the art sensors would track every possible data point, which would be analyzed by a team of data scientists to produce the optimal nutrient formulation to feed the fetus. Top ups of the nutrients would be supplied in powdered form each month, just add water. Each womb came with a syringe for refilling the amniotic fluid and an extra set of batteries for the crucial sensors and power supply.

It was as if the transhumanists and the “Quantified Self Meetup Group” had moved to their elite existential crisis island and had a baby. To me, it was the perfect illustration of our absurd desire for machines and data to give us a sense of control over the most vulnerable aspects of humanity. I had learned that there was no future in which my body was guaranteed to produce a healthy baby, and I wanted the wearable womb to show that machines and data were not an answer. It was a future I had created only to destroy, a future I felt the world needed to see in order to avoid.

At art school, even the walk to the bathroom is a runway. It’s a place to be seen and judged, which was exactly what I needed next. I needed to know if my creation had “worked,” if it told the story I wanted it to tell. And so I wore my womb around campus like the latest Pradas, cradling my bump with a face that said, “What? This old thing?” As all cool art people do, I enlisted a friend to follow me around campus with a camera as I posed, holding the belly like I’d seen the Instagram moms do, performing motherhood until I had embodied it. 

We collected an audience and I gushed about the little fetus in my transparent belly to anyone who asked. Like a helicopter mom, I hovered over them as they strapped the belly to their own bodies and tried on motherhood for themselves. “Please,” I urged. “Don’t jostle the sac.” Any jostling would risk injury to the fetus inside and my catastrophic insurance didn’t cover “improper use.” When a wire flew loose and the fetus’s LED heartbeat went dark, we all held our breaths until I wiggled the wire back into place through the emergency access panel. Phew, we said, as the LED heart blinked once more. Close one.

As I strode around campus wearing my womb, I expected the occasional gasp of horror. After all, the device almost passed for a bomb with its wires and blinking lights. Of course more horrific than a bomb, I thought, was the suggestion that something like the wearable womb could exist. I had anticipated a collective disapproval because I disapproved. I had made something I believed should never exist and expected people to more or less agree. What I hadn’t expected were the eager customers.

Young women opened up about the fears they had about what pregnancy would do to their bodies. Many said they never wanted to have children because they were worried about a lifetime of incontinence, painful sex, or the countless other postpartum conditions no one would have told them about until it was too late. Others had polycystic ovary syndrome, Crohn’s disease, or other medical conditions that might make it difficult or impossible to get pregnant. The womb offered them a sense of hope. In fact, the womb offered a solution for lots of people who couldn’t carry their own children and who might normally rely on adoption, donor gametes, or surrogacy.

At first, I wondered if the wearable’s popularity was a generational thing, if maybe the Gen Z students who had grown up with technology were somehow less disturbed by it than I was. My generation had known life before smartphones, before we wore our personal computers in our pockets or strapped around our necks. Maybe a computer strapped to the belly with a baby inside wasn’t as much of a leap for them as it was for me and my fellow Millennials.

I asked older friends and family what they thought: would they trust a machine to grow their baby? Some agreed with me: the wearable was dystopian, a science fiction fantasy for a Brave New World that undermined everything it meant to be human. It was another device that offered a false sense of convenience and control, another way to make money off of the data farm of human beings. There would be too many unintended consequences. It was a slippery slope. Wouldn’t people get tired of wearing it around? Surely this would lead to clone armies and dumpster babies? I better throw the thing out, they said, before anyone got any bad ideas.

I want  to say I’ve  learned  enough  to be  at peace  with my  biology,  but to  say I’ve  spent less emotional  energy  on the  whole  fertility  debacle  would be  a lie.

Others disagreed. When I texted a photo of the womb to my friend in New York, the first thing she said was, “I want that.” She had decided at twenty-six that she wasn’t interested in having kids, but would consider it if she could grow her own in a device like mine. Some mothers said they wished the wearable had been around when they’d had their babies, that everyone is supposed to love being pregnant but they’d hated it. It wasn’t that they regretted having children, but if there had been a way like this to do it they would have taken it. Even a few dads were on board. One tried on the womb and said he’d wished he could have helped carry the load when his wife was pregnant. Others said they’d felt left out of the biological connection their baby had with their partners who gave birth, and that the womb would be an equalizer.

As I lay the womb to rest on my corner table in the studio, I felt what Dr. Frankenstein must have felt. I was no longer sure if I’d created a monster or a miracle. I had made the object as a provocation to illustrate a future I wanted to avoid but it wasn’t that simple. It wasn’t just the transhumanists and the “Quantified Self Meetup Group” who might find this future appealing. All around me, people were struggling with questions of fertility, reproductive labor and equality and many felt the same desperation I had felt when I first saw those mushrooms growing from my belly. I remembered my stack of references in the library and how feminist Shulamith Firestone had called for “the freeing of women from the tyranny of reproduction by every means possible,” proposing human-made solutions to replace nature’s oppressive conditions. Reproduction needed to change, for all of us, and maybe another version of the wearable womb could, in fact, provide the answer.

Back in the studio, I honed my creation. I took cues from the Biobag scientists who acknowledged concerns about the “parental perception of having their fetus in a ‘bag.’” I ditched the wearable in favor of the design language of medicine and trust, swapping the aesthetics of transparent electronics and luxury craftsmanship for high tech satin surfaces and medical grade components. This version of the womb wouldn’t be worn haphazardly through the streets relying on spare AAAs. It would be housed in a medical facility with the security of a backup generator and medical professionals on hand at all times. The scientists also suggested the “clinical device will be designed with many features that should allow the parent to be connected with the fetus,” including cameras and speakers that played sounds to mimic the natural conditions in the womb. I recorded my most soothing voice in the art school bathroom and programmed it to play on loop inside my creation. When I was finished, this next womb looked more like a retro version of an incubator than anything you’d find in The Matrix. It looked, I hoped, like something you could trust. 

Armed with what I thought was a less divisive version of the womb, I turned back to science. Over the next several months, I spoke with fertility specialists, obstetricians, and social scientists who studied pregnancy and motherhood. I emailed them photos of the device and asked if it was something they would trust. Was the artificial womb the future of birth?

They were skeptical. Some were adamant the technology would never work. Others, like one medical anthropologist I spoke to, said there was too much we didn’t know about the interaction between mother and fetus. She said playing a voice recording on loop would not make up for all the important biocultural information integral to our development in the womb. Something innately human would be lost if we ever went down this path. 

In the context of fertility, the doctors and social scientists I spoke with said it wasn’t the technology that needed to change. Even women who, at one point, wanted a baby enough to freeze their eggs, often never came back to use them. These former patients said it was social issues, not technical ones, that kept them from wanting children: they’d never found the right partner or achieved the financial security they felt they needed to raise a child. If anything needed fixing, the doctors said, it was the misinformation about egg freezing as an insurance policy. It was the cost of childcare and addictive dating apps.

The experts I spoke with said context was everything and the context we couldn’t avoid was our culture of capitalism and technocracy. We were taught to trust scientists and technologies over our own bodies, priming us to feel desperate when we couldn’t control our biology. Even Shulamith Firestone, who had called for radical transformation of reproduction, had admitted that “under the direction of current scientists… any attempted use of technology to ‘free’ anybody is suspect.” One doctor I spoke with said that technologies originally designed for emergencies, like cesarean sections, often became available to healthy women on demand. She noted the rise in elective C-sections in Brazil and said the people who were designing the Biobag to save premature babies knew the context they were operating in. They knew where the technology could lead and that there was a market of women primed and ready to use it as an alternative to pregnancy.

Back at my corner table of the studio, I knew this was the story I wanted to tell. It was time for my final artifact. I posted an ad on a job site for actors and hired a woman and her nine-week-old baby to play the starring roles in my budget student film. I could hardly believe it when the actress turned up for filming with a real live baby in a stroller. They joined me at Guy’s Hospital in London where I’d managed to convince someone to let us film in an abandoned hospital wing. It was there, amid the blue curtains, broken gurneys and tattered waiting room furniture, that the artificial womb story came to life. 

In the film, a woman signs up for an experimental birth service that allows her to have a baby without destroying her body or career. In the nine months leading up to the delivery, she uses an app to track the baby’s progress while the fetus grows safely under the care of physicians. When the fetus kicks, her mother’s phone vibrates. They’re constantly connected. The film poses a question: in the right context, would you trust scientists to grow your baby in a lab? My main character did and in the end she’s conflicted. Was it the right choice? Did she feel she had a choice at all? Should technology ever attempt to fix human societal problems?

I have tried to answer these questions for myself. Last year, I turned thirty-five and fell off the mythical egg-deteriorating cliff I’d been dreading. I no longer have dreams about my mushroom womb but fear the desperation I once felt could sneak back in if I try to have children and cannot. I want to say I’ve learned enough to be at peace with my biology, but to say I’ve spent less emotional energy on the whole fertility debacle would be a lie. After touring the film around, I plunged all my remaining worries into a novel about the future of pregnancy and birth. I’m still writing about these questions now.

There are elements of the artificial womb future I want to believe in, but whether or not it becomes a reality is not for me to say. The Biobag inventors have raised at least $100 million for their startup and are seeking to begin human clinical trials in a few years. As for my own artificial wombs? They’ve been binned. When the red food coloring (blood) began to mold, I threw the wearable into the dumpster outside my apartment building. I like to think someone found it in there, decided to fish it out and try it on, to perform motherhood until they embodied it and brought the future to life.